Meanwhile in America

[TheReal_ND]

OK, you all know me fairly well, as an anonymous internet friend.

My last training in programming was MIS201 in 1986 which was exclusively BASIC and the final project involved a flow chart with two or three decision nodes IIRC.

I think if I busted my ass about 7 or 8 hours a day I could be writing decent code in one of these C languages by labor day. Am I full of shit here?

Writing unintelligible code that only a handful of people can understand?
You're a natural.

Code is code. If you are smart enough you can kind of figure out what's going on if you know at least one kind of code like C, and have to look at something else you aren't familiar with. White people are able to do stuff like that but pajeets are thoroughly incapable of even looking at something they haven't been particularly trained with.

[Ph64]

OK, you all know me fairly well, as an anonymous internet friend.

My last training in programming was MIS201 in 1986 which was exclusively BASIC and the final project involved a flow chart with two or three decision nodes IIRC.

I think if I busted my ass about 7 or 8 hours a day I could be writing decent code in one of these C languages by labor day. Am I full of shit here?

Writing unintelligible code that only a handful of people can understand?
You're a natural.

Code is code. If you are smart enough you can kind of figure out what's going on if you know at least one kind of code like C, and have to look at something else you aren't familiar with. White people are able to do stuff like that but pajeets are thoroughly incapable of even looking at something they haven't been particularly trained with.

I might challenge that, you should try picking up Lisp that way.

My prof in college commented my Lisp code "looked like I was trying to write C/Pascal". Guilty as charged.

I walked into my last job never having written so much as a "hello world" program in Java, but within a year I was fielding questions from all the offshore/Indian programmers on their programming issues, "because you're an expert at it" - lol, I've still never actually written a java program (though I've written some snippets of code to show them the right way to do something).

Can you do assembly language and read hex dumps though? How about convert between hex/octal/binary/decimal in your head for smaller (under say 3digit, 10for binary) numbers?

I remember giving up after trying to explain to an offshore Indian "programmer"...

If (x == 5) then {
..do stuff here...
return;
}
else if { (x==5) && (y<=3)} then {
..do some other stuff...
return;
}

That the "else if" and "other stuff" would never ever happen, and they should either reverse those tests or just remove the second one entirely since it didn't actually do anything. A good 30 minutes trying to explain it, with him insisting I was wrong, before I gave up... Code is probably still there to this day. Fuck it, wasn't hurting anything apparently, so NMFP.

[TheReal_ND]

You asking me? Im just repeating what a tech guy told me. I personally only have the shallowest understanding of Python, HTML and C++

[Speaker to Animals]

Writing unintelligible code that only a handful of people can understand?
You're a natural.

Code is code. If you are smart enough you can kind of figure out what's going on if you know at least one kind of code like C, and have to look at something else you aren't familiar with. White people are able to do stuff like that but pajeets are thoroughly incapable of even looking at something they haven't been particularly trained with.

I might challenge that, you should try picking up Lisp that way.

My prof in college commented my Lisp code "looked like I was trying to write C/Pascal". Guilty as charged.

I walked into my last job never having written so much as a "hello world" program in Java, but within a year I was fielding questions from all the offshore/Indian programmers on their programming issues, "because you're an expert at it" - lol, I've still never actually written a java program (though I've written some snippets of code to show them the right way to do something).

Can you do assembly language and read hex dumps though? How about convert between hex/octal/binary/decimal in your head for smaller (under say 3digit, 10for binary) numbers?

I remember giving up after trying to explain to an offshore Indian "programmer"...

If (x == 5) then {
..do stuff here...
return;
}
else if { (x==5) && (y<=3)} then {
..do some other stuff...
return;
}

That the "else if" and "other stuff" would never ever happen, and they should either reverse those tests or just remove the second one entirely since it didn't actually do anything. A good 30 minutes trying to explain it, with him insisting I was wrong, before I gave up... Code is probably still there to this day. Fuck it, wasn't hurting anything apparently, so NMFP.

Indian software engineers are fucking awful. The ones that come here and get American educations are not necessarily bad, though.

Lisp is the master race of programming languages. It just takes time for functional programming to click in your brain. Imperative programming languages are cool too, but I think functional programming is in for a come-back in a big way, especially with soft AI and deep learning taking off. Python was a terrible choice for data mining.

Even Java is going functional now. It has lambdas and everything.

[Speaker to Animals]

I will write in whatever language is best for the job. It's not difficult to use new languages once you understand how everything works under the hood. But my favorite for AI is Lisp, for most high-level programming it is Java, and for embedded systems C.

I like Python because of all the data mining libraries. The language itself is awful, in my opinion.

Either we should wait for Java to make the transition to mostly functional programming and port the libraries there, or develop a new version of Lisp. I vote for a new version of Lisp that is completely open source and not controlled by a corporation.

[Ph64]

Lisp is the master race of programming languages. It just takes time for functional programming to click in your brain.

Yeah. Just saying that while knowing C/C++ might help you pick up Java or Python fairly easily/quickly, not sure the same holds for Lisp - it's a different mindset.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I’ve been surprised at how much trouble C devs have with SQL. There’s a lot to know behind the scenes.

[Speaker to Animals]

I’ve been surprised at how much trouble C devs have with SQL. There’s a lot to know behind the scenes.

SQL is just a completely different thing that people have to get used to. Databases in general are their own thing with a lot of intricacies and pitfalls that are very unique.

Anybody can learn to write queries and pass that through some kind of API. But beyond that, we really don't want to mess with a database. For the sake of robustness and basic software engineering principles we like to hide all that behind adapters in some API that can handle a lot of error and sanity checks for us.

[Speaker to Animals]

Lisp is the master race of programming languages. It just takes time for functional programming to click in your brain.

Yeah. Just saying that while knowing C/C++ might help you pick up Java or Python fairly easily/quickly, not sure the same holds for Lisp - it's a different mindset.

The two branches of programming languages (broadly speaking) are functional and imperative. Once you learn how both kinds of languages work, picking up new languages is not really a big deal. It's just that initial leap. There is not going to be a huge crossover between imperative and functional languages, so you need experience with a language from each category.

Though.. in the future the boundary is getting blurred, as we see with Java already.

[Speaker to Animals]

Functional languages, in my opinion, are the technically superior class of programming languages. An imperative language is lower-tier in terms of power. With an imperative language, you are basically solving a specific instance of a general class of problems. With a functional language, you can write code that solves the entire general class of that problem by generating code to solve specific instances of that class given some set of parameters.

i.e. writing code to solve a specific problem is basic bitch programming; writing code that generates code that solves most instances of an entire class of problems is next level.